Sunday, December 6, 2015

Back in 2007 we built a log home on our property in Patrick County, Virginia. The logs were milled by Southland Log Homes at its mill near Elliston and delivered on a cold rainy day in May '07. They gave us plenty of materials -- including about 10 percent more logs than we would need, just to make sure there was enough in case some were ruined during construction.

The house went up pretty fast during construction, but not as fast as it went up three years later after it was struck by lightning. The house burned to the ground in June of 2010. We rebuilt with Hardy Plank siding -- tough to burn, or so we are told -- and never got around to using the left over logs.

Not until the other day, that is, when our son John was visiting. I had rounded up some stone and a fire ring, and we pulled back the tarps on the unused eight-tear-old logs and brought a few of them into the little patch of woods east of our house. Had a bunch of Ollie Screws -- the long skinny screws log home companies use to torque down on the logs -- and we screwed them into some leftover six by sixes that we had trimmed down to size. Burned up one drill before we borrowed a heavier duty driver from a friend to get those long screws down into the wood.

You see the result here -- along with my kindling cart, converted from an old baby carriage that once belonged to our neighbor Leslie Bevacqua's daughter in Raleigh and tossed out on the trash heap one morning. Helps keep us warm up here at nearly 3,200 feet of elevation in the Blue Ridge.

About Me

Jack Betts is a journalist who moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia after nearly 40 years in journalism in North Carolina and Virginia. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he was a Pentagon photographer while in the Army, Washington correspondent for daily newspapers in Norfolk, Roanoke and Greensboro during the Watergate Era, Raleigh Bureau Chief of the Greensboro Daily News, editor of North Carolina Insight magazine, N.C. Public Television panelist and associate editor of The Charlotte Observer. He won six 1st place prizes in the N.C. Press Association's annual editorial competitions, and was inducted in 2006 into the N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame. He and his wife Martha B. and their dog Sadie live on an old farm near Meadows of Dan, VA. From May through October he plays bass in the Jim Marshall and Friends Jam on Friday afternoons at the Blue Ridge Music Center near milepost 213 just south of Galax, VA.